Disclaimer

Black Dragon is MY Viewer, i decide which feature i want to add and which to remove, i share this Viewer to show the world that user base size is not important, i do rate quality by effort, thought and love put into the project, not some rough estimated numbers. I consider feature requests only if i you can name proper valid reasons i can agree on. It is my (unpaid) time i'm putting into this project, i'm not here to cater to every Joe's desires.

Saturday, December 24, 2011

Finally! 2 Months of continuesly working finally comes to an end, as some of you may already know (or not) , with this "Final Release" all Future updates will only be corrections , additional shinies or simply bugfixes , depending on how much stuff comes out and how important they are i will reduce or increase Releasing speed , meaning that it might be possible to get up to 2+ Releases a day. In future i will also think of a better System to announce those lots of bugfix releases , probably through a Forum. As of Nirans Viewer turning 1.0 officially , theres a lot of new stuff to explore and experiment with , but dont forget , this Viewer is based on Shining , Viewer-Development (not always recent as example the MultiCurl thingy was left out...because of you know...problems which i will check in future) , some Features of other Viewers like Firestorm , Kirstens , Catznip , and several secret (or not) Repositorys with nice (maybe some secret ones aswell) Projects i can find , all critically weighted good vs evil and decided if it fits my Viewer aswell as my Goals to create a Viewer with the probably best Graphics in Second Life. Well you might also noticed that my Builds are getting slower and slower by nearly each build i implement a cool new graphics feature or turn up graphics even more , logically thats normal , higher graphics mean less FPS on the same PC , even i have reached a point in which i feel.... old with my GTX 460 and AMD Quad Core again i mean , with all new shinies n stuff im getting about 20-40 FPS in average which is compared to Kirstens times not really less....even more but highest Values have fallen , so my times with 50-60 FPS are down to 40 MAX now... but you can also see the difference , it looks totally different as in ANY other Viewer. Why all this graphics , graphics and even more graphics? there are a few reasons , i think SL has come to a point in which it finally needs some change , SL graphics have been held back for faaaaar to long, now as i can decide how they should look and how far they can get , i say just MORE , theres so much SL still can do which NONE of us has yet discovered , and im striving to get to those limits without care about Performance , screw performance , we will gain it anyway , weither it is through upgrading our System , luck or optimisations i or LL or someone else does....

Anyway , lets come to the main thread again , the Release of Nirans Viewer 1.0 , theres a lot to say about it so lets start!

Graphics:
in Graphics i´ve a lot of stuff lately and the last few days , most noticable is that your FPS will again decrease (probably) because of the newly implemented Shadow rendering algorythm which gives way better quality , less pixelated mud and most importantly it extremly decreases the for long noticable pixelation when turning the camera around in a special position/angle , also shadows will reach a whole new level in resolution , i did a (unfair) comparison between them , i´ve set the old rendering to EXTREME (which caused my FPS to cripple to 50%) and the new one to High (which is default) , and guess what? on High in new rendering it looks very close to that of EXTREME in old rendering , you can see smaller shadows like from sticks , wooden fences , cables etc from way farther ahead in way higher quality because shadows doesnt pixelate that extreme anymore , making it a good replacement of the old rendering , in average you will probably loose 1-5 FPS (depending on how much you actually have) but as i said compared to what you would lose on way higher quality to archieve the same quality in old rendering its nothing, so YAY for that!

Old

New

Old

New

New (High)

Old (EXTREME)

, along this Major changes , there were some internal changes , and some extremly tiny minor changes to Depth of Field and SSAO again , i also made it possible for you to easily change the new SSAO back to the old style (seen in pics) aswell as the failish Shiny/Bumpmapping , you can switch between old and new to your liking but let yourself said , the new one is the Windlight one which has been posted as "fix" to SH-1912

IT IS NOT INTENDED TO BE USED IN DEFERRED! STOP COMPLAINING IN JIRA!

IM SICK OF SEEING PEOPLE RUINING SL GRAPHICS WITH THIS KIND OF SHIT CHANGES

Also have a look at the soon deriving Animated Trees feature , which will obviously stay in my Viewer , atlast until somethig bad happens ...or will be replaced

Skins:

With 1.0 "Darkness" has been officially finished and set as new Viewer Default! , you can find it in Preferences - Skins/Themes , select it there and relog to see the new Skin , i´ve put a lot of time into this skin to make it completly different from everything you´ve seen so far , it makes a lot usage of fading , black and yellow/white.

Also with 1.0 comes Miguaels skin called Ashen Blood which is basically a recolor of my Skin as it looks , it was available as additional skin in Kirstens aswell , like my Azure long ago , it makes huge use of Black and Dark Red , so be carefull not to lose your last few blobs of life juice in there =D

User Interface:

The User Interface is the core of every Viewer , without it most of you (me included) wouldnt be able to use a Viewer at all...atlast for non command liners... over the past 2 months i´ve put alot of time and work into my UI , making it different , changing nearly every aspect of the UI without breaking it too much , a lot of ideas and suggestions from you the Community has been added in some way , another main Goal of my Viewer is reached with my UI , it gives you extreme control of how your Interface can look , you can rearange all buttons along the top/left/right and bottom bar , you can set them to Text and Icon or Icon only , you can move every Window around , customise the Topbar , disable the quickbuttons or enable them... , you can hide the navbar , the favbar , the bank display , the draw distance slider and in Azure you can even set transparency by disabling one or more of the topbar-texture-layers , not to mention that you can enable pie menus and also customise them in an extreme way ... color of text , background , selected pie , pie lines aswell as transparency and fade out of the menu background , you will also see a live preview for the colors you set beside the pie menu options , which allows you to directly see what you change and how it would ~look without having to right click something all the time! in near future i will also add the ability to customise Camera Presets like its possible atm via Debug , just in Prefs meaning way easier to find and customise.

I will also update and change the UI in future updates , and maybe i will completly redo it someday so stay tuned

apart from that i redid the IM Panel again , when i tried to clean up in code i found code pieces for Voice-Volume , Mute and Block/Unblock which i added to the IM Panel now and required me to rethink it a bit , you can now click on the wrench icon to slide all controls out and slide in the new voice/block/unblock/mute controls , same goes vise versa ...have a look!

theres also the now fully functional Optimizer Panel which can be found in Preferences - Graphics (yea RIGHT , Graphics 2 is gone and Advanced graphics is now a seperate tab) besides Reset.

This window is designed to be kept on for a long time on screen without decreasing FPS and taking up too much space , making it easier to compare graphic settings/options , it can be slid out/in by clicking the menu buttons , which then will reveal new options. Graphics 1 also has been redone and simplified a lot , no changing labels anymore , a few more hover tips , and some corrected

Bugfixes:

As always there has been a lot of fixing going on , some of you may encounter less crashs , some a lot more , some none at all , we all know SL is a crashy and unstable piece of....you know , thats because so many different systems and system setups aswell as OS´s have to run on so many different clients setups in so many special situations in many different SL Server Versions etc etc , atm theres simply no way to ensure stability , so i just hope you are lucky and dont crash all the time , because that would be bad...

Ahern:

I´ve done some test runs on Ahern but there never were enough people to crash the Viewer , so i cannot say for sure if its fixed or not , but you can try if you want , would be interessted in knowing if it works there now , if now , tomorrow will follow a "Fix" which MIGHT fix it ...we will see

Features:

Since i started from Shining 3.2.1 with default LL UI , there has been added a lot of stuff , you could watch the huge Todo list getting longer and longer , but atlast the most important have been finished , those that were in Kirstens and some little additional things , but theres one thing i want to tell you , you may ask for features or suggest a good one , if its a graphic related feature , and available somewhere there will be a nearly 100% of adding it as long as it isnt a stupid idea like the SH-1912 thingy.... everything else will be critically weighted and i will most likely discuss a lot with you about how bad it can be used and what reasons i have why i implement it or why not , i know theres no way to ensure that people wont use a feature in a bad way , but i will definetly take care of my Features and also try to make them as harmless as possible , because i simply wouldnt like hearing that my Viewer is some sort of a crash/grief or whatever Viewer because it has X Y Z....well theres another thing about those Features.... are they worth implementing? i mean this is obviously a Machinima/Graphics Viewer for Photoshooting , taking Videos , or just seeing/enjoying Second Life´s beautiful side , so please dont tell me i need a huge radar with lots of extra features because you are an estate manager , like i said this is not a multi functional uber viewer , its just a graphics specialised viewer created in a way i (more or less) want it.... well and LL gives us enough griefing tools from stock , the worst one is scripting and building if you dont know how to use it right =D

Forum / Website & Third Party Viewer directory:

Forum? Forum. Forum?! Yes , im planning to go TPV with my Viewer , when this will finally happen...idk , but to accomplish this i have to fundamentally change a lot especially on Web side, thats why i created a Forum for you to use (link is on the right side) , to post news , feature request , bugs , tutorials etc etc, i will also have to make a note you will have to read before downloading my Viewer that tells you what data i collect and what uses i have for them (well technically seen im not collecting any data except what a LL Viewer would also do , im also not using them , and even if i would collect any other data , its 99.9% not "wanted" , i prefer asking people personally or in Forums , PM/IM or whatever , thats why im often saying you should comment or tell me inworld or something like that in other Forums...) , anyway i have to write that down somewhere , place the download under it so YOU have to read it , think your blabla about it and continue downloading it as it was before. My blog will sooner or later get an upgrade aswell , maybe it will be transformed into a normal Website , maybe not , im not yet sure about it

Tests/Previews:

If you are still not sure what you will get to see you can check out some Previews , just search for Nirans Viewer on Google , i´ve also searched the biggest and most complete one here which will get an update after this release , so check it out again soon!

Yes there will most likely a Linux version finally , Miguael which also "worked" for/with Kirsten joined me a while ago and is also working on some things i dont have time or hardware for , like a Linux Release , i know im a backstabbing guy but , if there are ANY problems with Linux , I AM NOT YOUR SUPPORT! i cant and wont help you , instead i will redirect you to Miguael or tell him as i cannot do a thing for Linux (i dont have Linux) so instead go to him directly ok? i will post the link here when the Linux download is ready

nothing really changed here except that my download is below all this massive amounts of text and that i will maybe try to fix the installer in future releases by doing a normal installer asides the WinRar executable :)

a short reminder , like said at the top i will probably do more frequent releases now , the first will be 1.01 tomorrow and the second on new year called 1.02 , i dont wanna stop you anymore now so go ahead and download it , have a MERRY CHRISTMAS to you all!

Changelist:

for all of you that want to see the complete changelist for everything from Build 5a/b up to Release ,here it is

VWR-27832 L$ Transfer failures show alert as if successful

ER-1473: fix teleporting in sit mode. Viewer fix - reviewed by Callum

SH-2743 Fix for shader compiler error on some GL 3.x implementations.

SH-2735: LLCurl causes SL to freeze when logout

SH-2734 trade HSV effect matrix for a simple value scaler, since that's all it's been used for for years now.

SH-2726 FIX -- Texture Console and Debug Console inaccessable

SH-2694 Fix for FPS drop when mousing over flexi objects (don't use an octree for flexi raycast)

SH-2680 Bring back blurred edges on objects closer than the near focal plane.

SH-2671: sometimes other avatar textures don't load

SH-2668: "ocean" water is always 20m high instead of the Region Water Height

Monday, December 19, 2011

again nothing to say much here , more UI work , some finalisations on Darkness and some internal changes which are the reason im uploading number 2 , i wanna check if this is a crash monster or not , i dont wanna release a crash monster on christmas...u know...

NOTE: if you previously disabled CurlUseMultipleThreads , you now should be able to savely enable it again to prevent frame skipping (single frames that produce stuttering or freezing for a tiny moment in a super smooth picture) if not , keep it disabled , its your choice , i´ve enabled it and all my test runs until today worked without any crashes , also please be aware that crashing on ahern is "normal" behavior , i havnt got around to test it with this release but im pretty sure it will still accour after a few seconds on ahern , so please keep yourself away from this region until i mark it as save again , thanks

Saturday, December 17, 2011

here a short list of Features:
we got lots of crashes
normal crashs
fast crashs
slow crashs
instant crashs
delicious crashs
awkward crashs
stinky crashs
ugly crashs
cool crashs
dark crashs
bright crashs
funny crashs
sad crashs
huge crashs
small crashs
freeze crashs
hard crashs
softie crashiieees
crashs before crashing
crashs while crashing
crashs for crashing while crashing
and the most important of all! an utterly and ugly designed UI to make the most out of your crashs, design them how YOU want them to crash, with cool sliders to adjust strenght of crashes , frequency and even the speed of crashs! all packed in a shity , stupid and totally useless nonesense WinRar Package in order to maximise uglyness all the way!

have a snapshot of the ugly UI for your crash-pleasures

grab your personal crash today and increase the amount of overall crashing on the grid!
awesome!

Note: today is not inverse-day or something like that im just having fun writing crash that often =D
seriously , no info sorry , i wanna do (like always) a huuge post about all the new stuff when Release hits SF on a special day...i also dont want to do a big announce over all this stuff when it might not work at all , this pre-release is there to have a look at whats coming in Release and probably my last chance to fix everything up to make the Release as good as possible

please reset your settings or if you dont want to , go to Debug Settings in Login Screen (activate by pressing CTRL + Alt + D and selecting Debug Settings in Debug menu) and disable CurlUseMultipleThreads , otherwise the above described funny joke will become true

About risks and side-effects read the package insert or ask your doc or apothecary

Thursday, December 8, 2011

ever wondered how many passes and shaders are needed to make awesome pictures and videos like i often did in the past or like im doing for my posts whenever i do a release? heres are 3 photo series showing you step by step how such scenes come together and what graphics are used and where they work

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

as promised i wanted to do a little update that mainly updates the UI to contain all RLV Options , Menus and Prefs aswell as RLV floaters , it also contains a little SH fix which adds back environment shiny to Lighting & Shadows shiny , making it a bit more chrome like (like in Windlight without Deferred)

also a little (dumb) bug was fixed causing the viewer to crash because of my new Windlight Edit floaters , because of a missing string (predefined text)...but we already know that LL based Viewers are.... really... hurtable with such tiny things...

also a little update to Beta 5 in general , see it as additional info to the already really big Release Post

Yes i changed the whole Camera Settings , the Presets , where the camera focuses and where it starts at , aswell as its general options , i changed the zoom time minimally , and adjusted the smoothness settings to make the camera smoother instead of doing those ugly hardcuts all the time (exception in build mode)

if you want to change them you can do so in Preferences - Advanced , thanks , thats all....yup im a bit pissed about that

Yes there will be an update to the existing fixed Beta 5 , it will add all missing RLV options like the Z offset , yes! RLV brought the Z Offset option , atm it can only be found in Debug , also the 2 Information floaters of RLV will follow , they allow you to check all RLV relevant options like lockings/unlockings etc etc it will mainly just an UI update so dont expect to much :)

NOTE: PLEASE LISTEN TO ME , ONLY ONE TIME! - RESET ALL YOUR SETTINGS OR YOU MIGHT GET RRRREAAAL EVIL PROBLEMS WITH RLV , REZZING ETCC:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\Nirans Viewer and delete the user_settings folder!make sure to do a backup!

this Test Build comes again with a HUUUUGE amount of changes , so lets start
the most notable thing is probably the new IM Control Panel i made , i completly redid it aswell as the Conversations Floater to fit this new Control Panel and cuz i was happy and people want customisation i also added the abbility to switch between vertical (new default) and horizontal tabs

then we have the big task to implement RLVa ,... i´ll say it simple: Its done and functional! :O it took me extremly stressing 10 minutes to implement it and fix it the merge errors , a really REEEEALLY HUGE thanks to Kitty Barnett who was so nice to give me a completly done patch file for the whole RLVa , which saves me from checking all 1000+ files manually and merging all lines

*aplauds to Kitty*
Thank you so much!

please have a laugh with me Kitty, at this pic i made with RLVa Game items!

i mean , isnt that a reason to go totally high and drunken?

heres also a Video of me running around totally high and drunken with RLVa xD

back to Customisation , i added the abbility to customise the Topbar even more! you can now enable/disable all 4 Topbar texture layers , layer by layer... for if you want a more transparent topbar or a completly transparent one!

theres also the possibility to disable the top toolbar to give floaters the space up there back , so they can be moved to the topbar (see first pic)

the UI has had some maintenance too , i aligned and eye-candy´d some sidebar floaters to make them look more readable , less space missusing and look better in overall

(left is new / right is old)

also a really ninja-like bug sneaked into my Viewer (which came from my new Topbar layout) which i fixed aswell , the X Y and Z Coordinates at the top screen part were hidden behind the Topbar itself making it nearly impossible to read them , no i assasinated this ninja

for gods sake ...and the failure of Local Bitmaps 2.0 i implemented the Local Bitmap Browser like Firestorm has it until Local Bitmaps 2.0 works again!

Next section is the render pipeline , Runatai has made some fixes which all have been included , as example the bug that caused this to look wrong

the most notable thing in the render pipeline will be the new SSAO settings and the according new SSAO which forced me to redo them , so please use the default SSAO settings ok? otherwise it will look ugly

heres a comparison of old / new

old

new

new

old

for those that want to read the whole changelog here it is:

STORM-1685 Wrong named control in floater_world_map.xmlSTORM-1679 Avatar Draw Weight number is always redSTORM-1663: allow wider range of pitch, make range the same for sitting and otherwiseEXP-1555 FIX -- Double-click is inconsistent between inventory and Received ItemsEXP-1548 FIX -- Clicking show on inventory offer does not open inventory (or received items panel)EXP-1547 FIX -- drag/drop inventory to agent - delivers to Objects, not Received items.EXP-1539 FIXED (Viewer crash when clicking twice on slapp link secondlife:///app/classified/create)EXP-1537 FIXED (Selecting More Info from Classified section in Search floater launches People panel with inactive Edit button and access to OLD profile window)EXP-1482 FIX LLInitParam::Parser spam in secondlife.log file when entering a search term in location bar launching the search windowEXP-1459 FIX Places panel shown on logni when destination selected from login pageSH-2713 FIX -- modified code to call LLPipeline::refreshCachedSettings only when settings that could affect it are modified.SH-2712 FIX -- added caching to isFullyLoadedSH-2710 FIX -- Removed calls to getChild happening every frame and during idle calls.SH-2708 Fix for broken shadows on alpha objectsSH-2700 Fix for random black textures due to texture index out of bounds.SH-2699 Potential fix for occlusion culling being overly aggressive on 9800 GTSH-2690 Fix for spammy triangle death on GeForce 7800 Go when selecting flexi attachments.SH-2681 Fix for shader compiler error on GLSL 1.30 and laterSH-2675 Fix for shadow appearing on terrain at midday when terrain is totally flat and there are no prims visibleSH-2670 Fix for terrain being wrong detail.SH-2666 Fix for pixel doubling failsafe on out out of memory.SH-2652 Fix for linux compile errorSH-2650 Fix for avatar eyeballs protruding from lower eyelidsSH-2621 FIXSH-2591 WIP -- fix for UI disappearing, introduces some artifacts in rotation ring, committing to debug elsewhereSH-2563 FIX -- Added diffuse map to the avatar rigid pass to properly set up the eyeball texture for Mac OS LionSH-2559 Remove fast timer (could be responsible for some crashes).SH-2449 Preserve texture scaling when animating textures when "size x" and "size y" parameters to llSetTextureAnim are zero.SH-2240 Make alpha mask cutoff even less aggressive (fix for eyes on Curious Ringtail avatar)SH-2240 Make alpha mask cutoff a little less aggressive (err on the side of not creating an alpha mask)SH-1865 FIX -- removed some old non-deferred rendering code that was preventing AA from working when GL_ARB_texture_multisample is unsupportedSH-1620 FIXSH-1619 FIXSH-1618 FIXSimpler and more symmetric interpolation/ease-in for DoF focus shifts.more general SSAO for personal use with 20 samples instead of 8 plus some minor tweakageuse different distance weighting, probably more correct, removes an unintuitive artifact.Changed default settings for new SSAO , enabled much higher Values in graphics panelfixed Max Avatars visible option in graphics panelRemoved unused code from alpha fragment shaders to fix some mac rendering glitches with non-fullbright alpha objects."Show" button from p2p transfer now opens inventory window and inbox panel, setting focus to the itemRemoved Media Browser , replaced by the Web Content Floater nowGreatly reduced the number of memcpy operations done on the media plug-in message output pipeAdd "Use Region Settings" to World->Sun menuadded RLVa 1.4.4added Optional tab alignment option to IM Settingsadded Local Bitmap Browsermade a new IM Control Panel to better fit the new IM Convo Floater layout